Muslimgauze returns to the dubby and laid-back styles after his recent
aggressive onslaughts. Packed in a digipak, edition of 600 copies. On the
cover you will find a cover for DAT only release. Send this along with your
blank DAT and get extra, unreleased material, which will not be available
anywhere else.

The excellent Black September, a 500-only limited edition, is a continuous,
five-part, 68 minute epic is as formidably competent as ever, although more
for the brooding, surreal nature of its sound-world than for its grooves,
which here sound almost subsidiary. The soul samples and restlessly evolving
minor-chord kaleidoscopes that unfold throughout the work is prima facia
evidence of a musician on a roll.

review by Paul Stump
This text originally appeared in The
Wire magazine (issue # 145).
Reproduced by permission.
The Wire on-line index.

The following appears in All Music Guide.

Boldly named after one of the most notorious Palestinian terrorist organizations,
the group which carried out the Israeli Olympic athlete massacre in 1972,
September matches its dark black artwork and design with equally doom-laden
music (mastered as one track, despite the five separate song titles listed
on the back). The title track relies on a slightly more gentle ominousness,
with soft string plucking reverberating around the beat, but things start
to pick up accordingly with the more aggressive, sharp-edged electronics
shading into a tense blend of percussion and energy on "Libya";
after shading away into a more minimal midsection, the track returns at a
nervous, quick pace, with drums and drum pads firing off echoes into the
mix as drones snake in and out of the song. One particularly gripping section
has shards of noise firing off in all directions before settling back into
the frazzled energy of the central beat, feeling like a soundtrack to a particularly
good chase scene in a movie. "Thugghee" and its accompanying remix
keep the unsettled edge up, with sudden drum and electronic pulse intrusions
erupting over the main flow of the songs. It's interesting to hear how Bryn
Jones' love of dub applies itself in even more creative and different ways
than from his productions of some years before, exchanging the slow pace
for a fast one and applying Krautrock drone principles. A nicely stretched
out, creepy remix of Gun Aramaic's "Opiate and Mullah" wraps up
this fine effort.

Second in the series re-editions of older Muslimgauze music released by
Staalplaat, "Return of Black September" (which is also the name
of one of the most notorious Palestinian terrorist organizations) presents
yet another face of the artist's eclectic production. Originally released
in a limited edition of 500 copies, the year 2004 will offer 800 lucky people
(make that 799, I got my copy already!) the possibility to taste Muslimgauze's
interpretation of what sounds like a deep, droning and disturbing ritual
made of soft finger-tipping Darbuka percussion skin patterns, single hits
of both delayed and unprocessed drums, loops of stringed wide-range instrument,
field-recorded noises and voices, or just breaths and whispers. Quite alienating
and scary at times, "Return of Black September" goes about its
business in a continuous fashion, divided into five parts, totalling more
than an hour of music. Experimental dark electronics meets tribal and ethnical
mantras of ancient and distant culture creating a new breed of electrified
world music. Although the middle of the record portrays the most inspirational
and every day life sounding part of this record, the darker and nastier side
takes the lead at the top and the tail of the record, with increasingly predominant
and saturated rhythmical grooves. Bryn Jones was so far ahead of its time,
you can't even begin to comprehend if you don't know at least one tenth of
his discography, totalling almost 200 titles so far.